Monday, 13 August 2012

Hot air, (ba)lunatic debate

I have tried to follow the pseudo-debate about Overseas Aid
in the nominally local press without laughing. Really, I have.

It started off when some junior league Ayn Rand groupie asked
why we don’t just abandon the whole concept of
overseas aid – or at least that individuals should decide for themselves what
to give through charity, instead of having their taxes spent by a government
committee. Fair enough question, if somewhat belligerently put, and for the
next week or so the papers carried exchanges in which the government minister
who chairs the Overseas Aid committee put some fair answers. As did the
retired PR guru who pretty much bankrolls the One World Centre now that
government are pulling out and the business sector have never put in, who…well……didn’t,
to be honest.

At this point a local finance
sector figure – a real dinosaur who I honestly thought by now was just
urinating what few brain cells remain against a wall while leaving younger,
sober minds to run his business –decided to have a pop. Predictably he took an
obscure example of African ‘misspending’ dredged up from an American ‘academic
publication’ produced by and for finance sector throwbacks who never got over
the end of apartheid. And predictably he could not equate this to any Manx overseas
aid project, because many of them favour faith-based charities and religion is
almost as sacred as racism and misogyny to the sponsors of such publications.

I didn’t expect the ‘other side’
would have an answer and they didn’t. A teacher who acts as the Global Poverty
Project Ambassador (in between throwing her hands in the air down at Living
Hell) did point out that he hadn’t actually mentioned a Manx project before descending
into the usual happy-clappy twaddle about helping the unfortunate. We were then
promised a letter page full of ‘argument’ in today’s Excrement.

We also got more in last week’s Indifferent about the GPP’s attempt to
get up a petition (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=47095).
Incidentally, as they’ve been putting this about for months and the numbers
haven’t risen I suspect the Mannifest crowd took no more interest than the rest
of the island.

So, I eagerly open today’s Excrement only to find ..well…just more of the same old really.
Hitler’s Grannies (Mothers Union), who’ve bagged £28K from the committee thus
far to religiously brainwash developing world kids but are looking for £42K in
all, more from other figures who pretty much depend on the committee for a job,
but neglect to mention that they advise it…and that was about it. Ho hum!

The funniest thing is that it would take a competent
journalist about two minutes to spot a huge joke.

Out of curiosity, I looked up
the Global Poverty Project, and as their main website is vague about their real
origins and purpose (which immediately tells me there’s a well-funded practitioner
of the grey arts hovering in the background) I looked a little further and got some
answers at http://globalpovertyproject.com/pages/about_globalteam
, which gives perfunctory detail on the real management – or at least the team
assembled by others to put the case for the unidentified sponsors.

In particular note PriceWaterhouseCoopers, auditors to some
of the nastiest companies and worryingly willing to sign off some of the oddest
accounting strategies, Bell Pottinger, founded on Tim Bell’s use of direct
marketing techniques to socially isolate and demoralise the miners for Margaret
Thatcher and more recently PR merchants to the most sickening dictators, and The
University of Western Australia’s Religion and Globalisation Initiative, which is
pretty self-explanatory.

What I suspect we’re really looking at is major churches
looking to control the aid industry and major business investors in the
developing world who are happy for this to happen because faith-based charities
(unlike, say, local political groupings or the international trade union
movement) never interfere with serious business investors who, in return, cut
their tax bills further with token sponsorship of religious charities and their
local church partners - who give token relief after the tragedy while also
propping up the anti-democratic business and political hierarchies which are keeping
the locals dispossessed.

I really wish this wasn’t the case, and that some useful and
productive Manx debate about the possible need, purpose, form and methodology
of overseas aid was kicking off here, but it just isn’t. If it ever did, all of
us should be willing to join in.

But for now, do we
even enter social and moral arguments thus far confined on one side to the type
of emotional blackmail which religious groups do so well and on the other to
the knee-jerk appeals to personal greed and fear of ‘big government’ by which
the ‘New Right’ seek to distract us from discussing real life issues? At this point,
I simply do not know.

For now, this seems one of many
topics currently destined not to be fully explored until we find the courage to
raise them, and of course the time and energy to explore and research far more
thoroughly first. Until we do, I fear that on the Isle of
Man we may be powerless spectators of pointless pseudo-debates.

I sometimes howl with laughter at
the sad, simplistic techniques and agendas of those involved. My only excuse is
that (1) if I stopped laughing I could get angry at the deceit and (2) that clampets
like this are never that effective in the real world anyway, so no more lives
are lost whichever pseudo-side pseudo-wins.

About Me

Stuart Hartill is a libertarian and lives on the Isle of Man, so must either choose to be amicably contrarian or get lobotomised and join the herd. An anonymous tax exile there was once quoted by an English journalist to the effect that Manx society is little more than 55,000 alcoholics clinging to a rock.
The population is now nearer 80,000, and everyday life is increasingly dominated by an obnoxious mix of fundamentalist Christians and anal-retentive tax exiles who are no longer welcome anywhere else.
The blogger is none of the above, which makes his life there interesting on even the dullest day and positively hilarious on others.